Windows 10: Files disappearing after transfer from one hdd to another

Hi guys,

This is my first post here but i have been reading this forum for a while so I know you guy will do your best to help, so thanks in advance.

I run a pc repair shop and have been having an issue where if I transfer files from any hard drive that is pugged into my desktop via sata to another hard drive also plugged into sata, the whole process of transfering finsihes but then after rebooting some or usually all of them have disappeared from the target drive. However if you were to check the available disk space it would appear that they are still on the drive. If i run chkdsk and repair errors the space is then freed up again and the files are still not there.

The reson I want to do it this way because I want to back up my customers files to my hard rive so I can reformat and reinstall windows on their laptops. The problem arrises when I want to transfer them back after reinstall. It only seems to occur when I put their hard drive back into the laptop and boot up. Once into windows the files are gone.

I cannot get my head around why this is happening. I have been using this method since windows xp all the way up to windows 8.1 and only seems to be happening on windows 10.

Really annoying as sometimes transfers can take 5 or 6 hours for it to then disappear. The only way i've found that works is if I copy the files from my desktop onto a usb hard drive then copy them from the usb hard drive to the laptop. Obviously this takes absolutely ages.

I should add that very occasionally it all works fine and there is no issue.
Any suggestions?

:)

 

How to prevent loss of HDD when copying many files from one drive to another

I've seen this issue posted many times over many years and have not read one solution yet.

When trying to copy many files between hard drives, the destination HDD disappears.

I have performed all the checks and balances to ensure the drives or files are not corrupt in any way but nothing seems to help.

The drives are either connected internally or externally and the same thing happens, whether going through a USB or SATA or internal bus, the destination drive disconnects and I have to perform a reboot for the drive to reconnect and appear again.

I purchased two brand new WD 2TB Black HDD's

Formatted to NTFS

Opened the HDD containing the files I want to transfer,

I choose one of the subfolders and perform a copy and paste,

after running for about 3 min, the destination drive is no longer available, it is gone from my list of hard drives .

It's very frustrating as I have tons of media files to transfer from one drive to another.

it seems to work if I copy one or two files at a time, then it remains stable but that's going to take me forever considering I have thousands of files all being media movies or music files.

If anyone reading this has found a solution, I would very much appreciate your input.

What about using a third party app like diskcopy from Acronis, that is what i will try next.

Moved from: Windows / Windows 10 / Performance & system failures

 

Copying/moving speed slow

Well, I'm not using any usb drive.

I'm transferring files from one partition to another partition of my infernal hdd (Western Digital Blue) and facing this issue.

Thank you.

looking forward for further support.

 

I understand that there is a new virus, ransomware, that deletes files. You may want to wipe the target drive clean by reformatting before copying, and be sure to do a virus scan on the source disk.

 

Thanks for the response but as I mentioned in the above post, the whole reason I'm doing this is because I am reformatting the hard drive. Also its unlikely that 99% of my customers have the same ransomware. Pretty sure this is a windows 10 glitch as it only started happening to me immediately after installing windows 10. Already done fresh installs on my desktop to be sure and also gone back to windows 8.1 and it works fine on there. Really puzzling.

 

I ran into the same problem when I first started sharing files with Win10 from another drive -- and it kept happening until I disabled FastStartup in Win10. Apparently, Win10 was putting the shared drive into Hibernation when it was shutting down, and this caused all kinds of filesystem problems when I then accessed that shared drive from another OS.

Disable FastStartup and your filesystem problems should disappear.